At one point I had a boss whose advice was to judge people by their shoes. Look for expensive shoes, yadda yadda. Whatever. My response “What about truly wealthy people who don’t give a shit about making an impact with what they are wearing and choose comfort and utility over fashion?”
Yeah, he didn’t have a response for that one.
He has a very discount young lovechild of Stanley Tucci and Colin Farrell feel to me, if male actors could give birth. Uh.
see also
Money is the cocaine of money.
Trump money is too new? His dad was the asshole, and Trump WANTED to make money to prove himself to dad. And then he was the asshole. And now his kids are the assholes, because making money is all they have.
Yeah, good point. The stereotype is that their kids are the worst. There is also a saying along the lines of “If you can remember how the money was made, you are nouveaux.”
ETA: I think it is important to remember though, that except for some entertainers and athletes, most of the people who move into the rich status are from upper middle class backgrounds. They may know what it is like to be not rich, but not what it is like to struggle.
That is the most pathetic thing I’ve heard in a while. You aren’t going to fool the people who actually have been going to the beach since 1808, but every signal can be faked, or attempted to be faked.
I have to imagine thai is the kind of thing that would be remembered. “Someguy’s grandfather BOUGHT expired beach passes, can you imagine? Guffaw”
To be clear, I think winning the lottery is the only acceptable way to have extreme wealth: you didn’t do anything evil to get it, and it is very clearly and explicitly luck that you have it.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it is the only path to extreme wealth open to me.
how delightfully unrelatable.
I think most people who find this clip relatable are relating to the server, not the person doing the ordering.
A friend’s husband is a pilot with a company that does private charter flights. He flies celebrities, millionaires, and such all over the world, often on short notice.
Apparently, we’d all be amazed at the number of billionaires who drive Toyotas.
Doesn’t shock me at all. I know my share of really rich people because they buy cheap seats, hang out and have fun , and you’d never know they were really rich. They didn’t get where they got by crashing multi million dollar cars or boats.
Artists. Rock stars and actors actually come from a pretty wide range of social backgrounds. Some are egomaniacal assholes, but they aren’t leveraging complex debt derivatives or paying people slave wages to skim off the top- They work a job that they get paid for. It just pays really well in some cases.
I somehow learned this when I was 13 working at a country club. After I got to know the members I drew the connection between how I was treated and how long they had their money or how wealthy they were. It was also predictable to follow the pattern of the new members who just became wealthy enough to join: they’d behave at first around the established members and within a year they were inviting their friends to the club and treating the staff like shit to show off how important they were. The second or third generation members were the best because they went there to relax and have a good time rather than announce their arrival.
Eh, not really boingboing worthy.
All the employees will throw a fucking party.
I had an aunt who ordered food like a rich psycho, despite her being a poor psycho.
“I’ll have the blank, but instead of blankety blank in it, I’d like flippity flop. Don’t use any of the higgeldy piggeldy, I want wibbly wobbly instead. Oh, and don’t cook it that way, cook it this way.” She’d essentially rewrite the entire dish, then invariably complain that it wasn’t very good. She unfortunately taught her equally pain in the ass daughter to do the same, and trying to dine out with one or both of them was an indescribably embarrassing experience. I bet there were riots when they hit mcdonald’s.
Contrived is one thing, as is obsequiousness. I do love waitstaff who actually care, and ensure a pleasant experience. Bugging us every few minutes isn’t pleasant.
“I’ve got gaucherie like no one’s ever seen before. My gaucherie is just so fantastic. I’ve got more gaucherie than anyone’s ever had. It’s the greatest gaucherie in the whole world, and everyone’s talking about it. ‘My god, donald trump is just so gauche. He’s even more gauche than John Gotti.’ My gaucherie is absolutely tremendous.”
I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Coca-Cola vending machine and a sledgehammer at the place where our fellow mutant enjoys their beer. Shipped from Heathrow.
Heard there was an incident at Heathrow, and the machine probably never was shipped there…
Presumably, they are in an establishment where that’s simply ASSUMED. “2 beers in a bottle, 2 steaks medium rare” – those steaks are $100+ dry aged whatever, and the beers are $25/ea for a couple of Stellas.
When price point is literally meaningless, if you want “the best”, you probably know where to get it, so you just go there. You don’t ask for the best. You just go where that’s all they serve. Why would they serve anything else?
Stella was $40.
Well such things are actually collectable.
I know another mechanic who collects them from around the country/world. But they’re on a wall in his office and he mostly gets them from cars he’s sprucing up to sell for customers or that have been totalled out.
Otherwise yes. People notice when you’ve bought a bunch of old ones.
For that reason buying a car that already has them is a thing. People will pay extra for a be-stickered car.
Who you bought that car from can even be important.
Like I said, fairly cloistered group. It’s a different value system, and it’s not about demonstrating wealth to everyone with extravagant spending. Few people are gonna say “wow that guy’s rich” over $50 being spent on a sticker. Most people wouldn’t even notice the stickers to begin with.
It’s about demonstrating class and position to themselves, by appeal to it’s longevity. A long standing tendency of American oligarchy to try and emulate European aristocrats. You can’t be the 87th Duke of Brown Sauce in a long line of Brown Sauce Dukes. But you can “my people came over on the Mayflower” an awful lot.
So it’s kind of an argument from antiquity thing. Don’t demonstrate how much wealth you have. Demonstrate how old that wealth is.
If you read around the history of tipping there’s a pretty intimate connection between this and the restaurant business. Tipping was originally a practice of the European aristocracy, later emulated by the gentry. And considered deeply un-American at first.
It was adopted around the Civil War, and especially after in emulation of Europe. In part to demonstrate class bonafides of the American money class, in part to reenforce the racial class structure.
I remember reading around that subject that the super rich’s polite treatment of service workers is more of a deeply embedded etiquette concern. That the properly rich and classy are expected to know how to treat servants.
“OK, so that will be one Kobe beef burger, extra spit.”
If they have very specific needs/desires–say, if they’re one of those super-picky eaters that will only eat french fries–they’ll hire a chef who does nothing but cook french fries, but they’re the best fries on the planet; the sort that McDonald’s executives dream about at night and wake up with an almost unbearable sense of loss thinking about. If they go out, and it’s not the best burger they’ve ever had, they don’t care if they spent $150 on it.
